In recent years, the functionality of wireless devices has expanded far beyond simple voice or pager communications. Wireless devices can now receive a variety of incoming messages including pages, e-mails, faxes, voicemails, and short message services such as weather or sports updates. In some cases the actual message, for example a voicemail, is not delivered directly to the wireless device due to memory, bandwidth, or other limitations, but rather a notification message is sent to the wireless device to notify the user that a message has arrived and is being stored at a remote location. These types of notification messages are known in the art as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,797,103, “Method and Apparatus For Informing A Remote Unit Of A Feature-Originated Call,” incorporated herein by reference. The notification messages, as well as some actual messages, are generally stored within the wireless device. However, most wireless devices are only equipped with a small screen that displays a few short lines of text or small graphics. To view each item that has been sent to the wireless device, the user generally must scroll through a series of screens or menus and may be forced to examine all of the items of a particular type, or sometimes all of the items regardless of type in order to find the message of interest. Most wireless devices can be set to alert the user that a new message has arrived, but this feature is not very useful if it is alerting the user every few moments that something new has arrived. The user is likely to begin ignoring the alert or simply turn it off. This may result in important messages going unnoticed among a large number of unimportant messages.
For example, a user may subscribe to a number of services for his wireless device, including paging, a sports score service, and e-mail. With all of these services active on a typical evening when a variety of sporting events are in progress, the user may be receiving several messages every few minutes. If during this time the user receives an important page or e-mail from his or her boss, the message may go unnoticed among all the other messages and the user may miss an important work assignment.
The user of a wireless device can be easily overwhelmed when trying to keep track of and prioritize the myriad of pieces of information that are arriving at any given time. It would be desirable for the wireless device to be able to organize the incoming information in such a way that the user can quickly and easily recognize and distinguish between important and unimportant items.